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Rob Ridings: What a truly strange comment. Are you really that "out there?" Requiring a town to do the same thing required of you and me -- namely, obey state law -- is not "bullying." And FYI, Chapel Hill can't have its own "gun laws." Per statute and with a few limited exceptions, gun laws must be uniform statewide. Were it not so, citizens would have to navigate a patchwork quilt of variable gun laws, never knowing for sure whether they were criminals.

There you go again, Kaaren. You say, "Guns may save lives...But they take lives too, at a rate far greater than they save lives" -- another "factoid" bludgeoned into the collective consciousness.

But is it true, Kaaren? Despite claiming to be a scholar, you don't cite empirical evidence (your side rarely does, at least not truthfully) because there isn't any. By contrast, let's look at work by the researcher who has probably done more to study defensive gun use than any other: *Liberal* criminologist Gary Kleck of the University of Florida.

Specifically, let's look at his book "Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control," which contains an excellent literature review on defensive gun use. Noting that flawed methodology in the "National Crime Victimization Survey" (NCVS) led to under-reporting of defensive gun use, he turned to your beloved co-conspirator Phil Cook, of Duke University, who has been cooking the books on the topic for years: "Faced with estimates that he [Cook] himself had helped develop, which radically contradicted his earlier acceptance of the deviant NCVS estimates, Cook refused to accept the verdict of the evidence." Refused? Doesn't sound like an unbiased research to me.

But after earlier noting that guns are used in self defense at least 2.1 -- 2.5* million times per year, here is the gem of the book: "Thus the best available evidence indicates that guns are used about three to five times as often for defensive purposes as for criminal purposes" (p.160).

So please, Kaaren: Tell us why we shouldn't believe you are just making this stuff up as you go along.

* "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun", Kleck, Gary and Gertz, Marc J., Criminal Law and Criminology, v.86, n.1, (1995).